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Dr. Peter Swift is a consulting geoscientist with over 30 years of experience in radioactive waste disposal. He was formerly a Senior Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he served as the National Technical Director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy Spent Fuel and Waste Science and Technology R&D Campaign and its predecessor, the Used Fuel Disposition Campaign, from 2011 until 2020. He has worked on evaluating the technical basis for both the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico and the proposed Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada, where he was the manager of the Total System Performance Assessment and then subsequently the Lead Laboratory’s Chief Scientist during the preparation and submittal of the DOE’s 2008 License Application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He also has experience in oil and gas exploration. Dr. Swift received a Ph.D. in Geosciences from the University of Arizona in 1987, Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Geology from the University of Wyoming in 1982 and 1980, and a B.A. in English from Yale University in 1974.
Deep borehole disposal of high-level radioactive waste has been proposed repeatedly and in multiple countries over the last several decades, but the concept remains unproven in the field.
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